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Polka bag

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polka bagI’m enjoying sewing so much at the minute!  I love that you can turn a pile of fabric, ribbon and lace into something you can be pretty proud of, in not much time (a naptime for me!).

When I pick Scarlett up from nursery, I seem to be gathering little items up and balancing them, or stuffing them into various pockets, so I thought it may be handy to have a drawstring bag to hold her change of clothes, comforter, note, bib, etc., at the end of the day.

polka bag 1

I bought this fabric this week, I thought this red ribbon would really pop against the blue, and I still have some of the broderie anglaise lace left from when I made her party dress.

Et voilà!  I’m really proud of this – so proud, I think I might add this to my repertoire for Baby Brain.  Speaking of which, I’ve just opened a Facebook Store, please nip over and check it out!

www.facebook.com/BabyBrainBoutique

A study in sewing

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StudyMy desk in the study, which I don’t think I’ve ever shown you, is looking rather busy at the moment.  Since my sewing machine arrived on my desk, I’ve been sewing project after project.

Other than Baby Brain creations, my machine’s been whirring away on bunting recently.  I have a trip planned to Ikea in the next week, to have a look at some storage solutions – as you can see, it’s overflowing with buttons, fabric and paperwork!

Polka dot cake

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Cake idea

What a year it’s been!  To celebrate my daughter, Scarlett, turning a whole one year old, I thought I might make a cake for her birthday tea party.  Fine.  Then I started looking to Pinterest for a little inspiration.  This is where it all blew up, because there are some AWESOME cakes out there!  Up to now, my nephew’s Spiderman cake of ’12 was by far the best cake I’d made, and I really, really did not know what I was doing.  Yeah, I can bake a cake, but I really have little clue when it comes to icing and decorating.

Tweet tweet.jpg

I drew out the little doodle above after all of my Pinterest madness.  My bird actually ended up looking pretty much exactly like this!  Yes, it looks a bit like a duck.  As well as all the amazing cakes, I was inspired by the polka dot birds hanging in her room.

Luckily for me, I have a bona fide cake expert in my friend Lenka, who creates beautiful and yummy delights (check out her facebook page!) – she made Scarlett’s Christening cake.  She repeatedly set me on the right track.

A week before Scarlett’s birthday, Lenka dropped into conversation that I needed to be making the decorations for the cake so that they’d dry in time.  Cue panic stations!  To combat said panic, Lenka provided me with:

  • 2 x 12″ cake tins
  • 2 sets of letters to spell out Scarlett
  • The number 1
  • The top of a piping bag to stamp out polka dots
  • A cake smoother.  I’ll get to this, it’s BRILLIANT!

So, if Lenka hadn’t been involved, I would have pretty much had a plain cake, with whatever Tesco’s Dr Oetker display had to offer thrown at it.

Cake decorations 1A week before the big day, I baked four cakes.  Yes, you read that right.  I had a dream of a graduating pink creation.  We’ll brush straight past that one, because it didn’t work.  I didn’t put enough food colouring in.  I then stacked the cakes in colour order (I was still crossing my fingers at that point) and froze them.  With Barry’s family coming to stay, I thought I wouldn’t have time to bake, ice, and decorate a cake as well as clean, etc.

The following day, I started making the decorations in two shades of pink.  Here are the polka dots, along with birds, letters, numbers and I iced the cake board for good measure.

Cake decorations 2For the birds, I drew around the ones in her room onto greaseproof paper and cut them out to draw around.  I made so many decorations because I thought some may crack and break, which they did.  I do wish I’d had a bit more patience with the letter R, because it was very stubborn and ended up looking, erm, full of character.  My friend Jemima said I’m not allowed to say it was crap.

I then waited a week to put it all together, but I won’t make you wait that long…

There’s a hole in my ceiling

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holey moley

Dear Liza, dear Liza.  Our living room lights decided to stop working last week.  If you’re a regular reader, you may already be in possession of the very useful fact that we have 13 lights in our living room.

These are the holes that poor Barry has had to saw into the ceiling that he painstakingly plastered after putting the lights in.

holey moley 2

He’s decided to forgo sourcing the problem after we lost count of the holes, and has instead run another wire from the kitchen into the living room, bypassing the problem area before the ceiling fell in on our heads.

Barry’s mum and dad are visiting at the end of next week (for Scarlett’s first birthday, already!), so the pressure’s on to make it right!

House valuation

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Barry’s bedtime reading at the moment is looking at houses online.  We’re not planning on moving any time soon (if any of my colleagues are reading this, don’t jump to conclusions!), but it’s nice to look.  He went as far (too far, in my opinion!) as sending an email asking for more information on one particular house, which is quite near to where my mum lives.

The estate agent called and left a voicemail the next morning to say that they’d arranged for an agent from our local office to come and value our house on Saturday at 9.45am.  Very proactive.  A bit too pushy.  But Barry thought, hey, why not?  We were interested in seeing whether the work on the kitchen (in which we sacrificed a downstairs bathroom and hallway for twice the kitchen) would have affected the value.

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Adult proofing

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Stair gate

Our house is now stair-safe for Scarlett, but a hotbed of tripping danger for me and Barry.  She won’t be able to get up or down the stairs until she grows about three feet and gets some serious manual dexterity going, which is excellent.

However, whoever designed the bloody gates with the bar at the bottom (and pressure gates STILL NEED SCREWING IN, don’t be fooled) had a real sense of humour.  Scarlett’s in more danger from me falling flat onto her because I can’t pick my feet up that extra inch.  I think Barry might have shed a little tear screwing gates into the house, especially into the black wall and the wooden bannister.  I could tell he was wondering whether we could move house before fixing the holes.

Socket covers

We’ve also got these things that go in the electricity sockets so she doesn’t electrocute herself.  Good job I’ve got nails for leverage, otherwise there’d be no getting those bad boys out.  And then I would never be able to iron.  Now, where are those nail clippers…

Wedding dresses

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Not for mine, I’ve been married ages, but I’ve been wedding dress shopping with two different brides in the last few weeks.  Both of them are gorgeous and slim, and all of the dresses look amazing on them; so amazing, in fact, that it makes me want to get married again!  Still to Barry, don’t worry.

Confession – I actually had three wedding dresses as it is: one I never wore, one I had to buy quickly as we got married at short notice as my dad was ill, and another for a blessing with our friends and family as the vicar wouldn’t let me wear my actual wedding dress.  So it’s not like I didn’t have the opportunity!  Lace is in at the moment though, and I have a little regret about how plain my actual wedding dress was, even though that’s exactly what I wanted at the time.

After I got married, I started thinking about what a great thing it would be to have a wedding dress shop and make all those brides so happy!  I’d serve champagne, and I would cry when they tried the dress on, maybe even design a few dresses… I’m looking at it through rose tinted glasses.  It would probably be more like me trying to clean fake tan and foundation off the delicate necklines and getting done for serving alcohol to underage relatives.

My new idea is sewing for little people.  I’m getting a bit ahead of myself – I’ve asked my lovely husband for a sewing machine for my birthday (one that I don’t have to turn by hand!) and I have lots of grand ideas of making clothes for Scarlett, and if I turn out to be any good, making them for other tots too.

Birdies

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We’ve finally got the polka dot birdie hooks up on the nursery wall, which means we can hang Scarlett’s hearts on there.  The birds were really cheap from eBay, but I think they look effective and go with the theme of the room and the wall stickers that are on the other side.

About time too, everything was just gathering dust on her windowsill.  We’ve got even more frames that we need to put photos in, but think I’ll wait a bit because we’ve just had quite a few printed.

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My shameful secret

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I may get lambasted for this by the pro-craft crowd, but I’m a bit embarrassed to admit… my name’s Michelle and I like to cross-stitch.  Lambasted for the embarrassment, not for the sewing itself.  I’m not getting any time to do it at the moment, but I started a baby sampler for Scarlett’s room before she was born and I am going to try my best to finish it soon.  Before she’s five.  Definitely before she’s ten.  Would it be a nice graduation present?

I love doing little bits as gifts for people, I’ve only ever had them gratefully received as I think you can see the time, work and care that goes into them.  I’ve sewn cards, bookmarks, and framed pictures, small and large.  I’ve made quite a few birth samplers, including one that I started when I was about fourteen or fifteen and took me years to complete.  It was around A3 sized and a lot of it was a deep blue – I remember clearly taking care over every stitch.  Couldn’t wait to start another colour.

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Simple recipes: krispie buns

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You know they’re ker-azy because they’re spelled with a Z.

This is another adaptation of my mum’s recipes from when she was at school (for her easy peasy buns/cake recipe, click here).  The adapted bit’s where I lick the golden syrup spoon.  These take about 5 minutes to make.  Less if you set everything out on the counter like in Jamie Oliver’s 30 minute recipes.  In that case, this would take about 3 minutes.

krispie buns

Ingredients

  • 2 level tbsp sugar
  • 2 heaped tbsp cocoa powder
  • 3 tbsp golden syrup
  • 100g margarine
  • 100g cornflakes or rice krispies

Method

Melt everything except the cereal in a pan, don’t let it boil.  Take off the heat and mix in the cereal well.  Use spoons to share the mixture between around 12 bun cases, pretty ones if possible.  Lick spoons.  Lick pan.

Here’s some I made for the NCT crew this weekend.  Nom.